Guide
The Sabancı University Sakıp Sabancı Museum was founded in 2002 in the Emirgan quarter of the Sarıyer district of İstanbul. It occupies the Atlı Köşk, long the Sabancı family's own house, together with a modern gallery beside it. The family assigned the house to Sabancı University in 1998 to be turned into a museum, along with the collection of paintings, book arts and calligraphy inside it: the ground floor became memory rooms showing the furniture the family used while living there, and the upper floor the galleries for the book arts and calligraphy.
Besides its own collections the museum has become known internationally through the temporary exhibitions in its modern gallery, which have shown work by Rembrandt and Monet, by Rodin and Picasso, by Salvador Dalí and Joseph Beuys, and by living artists including Anish Kapoor, Marina Abramović and Ai Weiwei. Its holdings were digitised in a project carried out between 2011 and 2013.
The house has passed through many hands. A different waterside mansion, known as the Mustafa Paşa Yalısı, stood on the site in the nineteenth century; Abdülhamid II gave it in 1889 to Prince Nicholas of Montenegro, and it served as the Montenegrin legation, the prince staying there on his visits to İstanbul. Nicholas, who took the title of king in 1910, sold it after he was deposed, and in 1913 it passed to Behiye Sultan, granddaughter of Sultan Mehmed Reşad. By then derelict, it was bought in 1923 by Prince Mehmed Ali Hasan, grandson of the Khedive İsmail Pasha, and pulled down; in its place he had the Italian architect Edouard De Nari draw the house now known as the Atlı Köşk. It was finished in 1927, but Mehmed Ali Hasan separated from his wife Ayşe İzzet Hanım at about that time and left for Egypt never to return; he never lived in it.
Members of the khedival family used the house as a summer residence, and in 1945 it passed to Mehmed Ali Hasan's sons, Prince Mehmed İzzeddin Hasan and Prince İsmail İzzeddin Hasan. Hacı Ömer Sabancı bought it from them on 17 September 1951 together with some of the valuables and furniture inside, and the Sabancı family began spending their summers here. Sakıp Sabancı moved in with his family in the 1970s, after his father's death in 1966. Heads of state and government received in the house included the American president Jimmy Carter, the French prime ministers Raymond Barre and Couve de Murville, King Albert I of the Belgians, the Japanese prince Mikasa and the Singaporean prime minister Lee Kuan Yew.
The name Atlı Köşk, the house with the horse, comes from a bronze horse made in 1864 by the French sculptor Louis Daumas and set in the garden. It had stood in the garden of the Mermer Konak in Moda, the house of the Ottoman statesman Mahmut Muhtar Paşa, and was bought at an auction held there in 1952 and brought here. A second horse stands at the museum entrance facing the street: it is a copy of one of the four Quadriga horses taken from the Hippodrome at Sultanahmet when the crusader forces sacked İstanbul in the Fourth Crusade of 1204 and set before the church of San Marco in Venice. Hacı Ömer Sabancı saw a version of it in a businessman's house in Italy in 1957, liked it, and had a cast taken and a copy made.
The collection took shape in the house. Sakıp Sabancı built up his collection of Ottoman manuscripts and calligraphy while living here, following his own taste, until his dealings with the antiquarian Raffi Portakal turned his buying in another direction: at Portakal's urging he began collecting oil paintings of the late Ottoman and republican periods as well. The collection was kept together with the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century antiques already in the house.
